page_title: Isle of Wight County Council
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Isle of Wight County Council / History
caption_attribution_description: Caricature of GM Baring. Caption read "Isle of Wight".
context_page_description: Isle of Wight County Council was the county council of the non-metropolitan English county of the Isle of Wight from 1890 to 1995.
context_section_description: County Councils were first introduced in England and Wales with full powers from 22 September 1889 as a result of the Local Government Act 1888, taking over administrative functions until then carried out by the unelected Quarter Sessions. The areas they covered were termed administrative counties and were not in all cases identical to the traditional shire counties. 
  To begin with, the Isle of Wight was part of the area of Hampshire County Council, but a year later the island was given its own county council, which came into being on 1 April 1890. Following the first elections, Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, 7th Baron Calthorpe was elected as first Chairman. He was succeeded in 1898 by Sir Godfrey Baring, 1st Baronet, who was Chairman for almost sixty years, until his death in 1957.
  Premises were acquired, the former Swan Hotel in High Street, Newport, and some houses on either side, and the County Council was based there for several years. A new building, designed in the Neo-Georgian style by Gutteridge and Gutteridge, was built on the same site and opened by Robert Sanders, 1st Baron Bayford, in October 1938. An extension was built on its east side in 1969.
  On 1 April 1995, following recommendations made by the Local Government Commission for England appointed in 1992, the county council and the island’s two district councils, Medina and South Wight (which themselves had been created by mergers in 1973) were replaced by a new unitary authority called Isle of Wight Council, the first elections to which were held in 1995.
caption: Godfrey Baring, Chairman
  1898 to 1957, by Spy
  in Vanity Fair, 1910
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